Five Tips for Time Management

When you have limited time and resources, it is critically important to make sure you are using your time well. What tasks end up taking most of your time?

Do those tasks lead to the outcomes you need, or do you find that these tasks are using up important time and energy that would be better spent elsewhere? What can you do to correct course and stay focused on what’s most important?

Do a time study: Track your time for a week to see where it all goes. This will help you identify where adjustments are needed by identifying the areas of your work where you are spending too much or too little time.

Make appointments with yourself: Block out time for your most important tasks, thoughts or conversations. Schedule time to deal with emails and phone calls so that they are not a constant distraction. Unplug (shut off your email or silence your phone) when you have a really important task to work on.

Stay focused on your results: Plan to spend at least 50 percent of your time engaged in the thoughts, activities and conversations that produce most of your results. Job Developers, for example, should be spending at least 50% of their time on employer outreach or activities directly related to obtaining employment for clients.

Plan on interruptions: Interruptions are inevitable, and part of the daily reality of working in refugee employment. Have a plan for how you are going to handle those unexpected client or employer requests. It may look like setting up a specific time to handle those requests (think “office hours”) or it may make more sense to build a cushion into your time that allows for interruptions (maybe assume that 15-20 minutes of every hour will go to something unexpected). Either way, having a plan for these situations will help.

Know what you want to accomplish and evaluate your own performance: Take five minutes before every call and task to decide what result you want to attain, and five minutes afterwards to evaluate how things went. This will help you refine your approach as you go, and make you more effective, whether you are working on case notes or speaking to an employer.

To read the whole article (which includes a few more tips!) from Entrepreneur.com, click here.

What time management strategies do you use in your work? Let us know in the comments section below!